Alert to Congress: Nuclear evacuation may bog down - Yahoo! News If you live in an area near a nuclear plant- what is your evacuation plan? Have you put adequate thought into what you are going to do if the roads are clogged?
I live just outside the 10 mile buffer of not one, but TWO nuclear power plants. Evacuation plan is the same for electrical grid failure: backpacks and boots. The way people drive around here, I would expect every major and most minor intersections to be gridlocked with accidents within 30 minutes or less of the traffic lights going dark. Or from panic fleeing of meltdown.
An evacuation of any sort surrounding any major metropolitan area would become grid lock regardless of the reason folks need to evacuate. Wonder how much money was spent by .gov to tell us the obvious. One does not need to be a nuclear scientist/engineer to figure this out. It was nice knowing you, @Quigley_Sharps and @melbo if the Columbia Generating Station suffers the same fate as Fukushima. As the GE Boiling Water Reactor at Hanford is of similar design of those at Fukushima. Oh yeah, just to make feel warm and fuzzy they put Trojan's reactor vessel in your backyard too. Care to take the spent fuel rods that are still in Rainier, being they never made it to the Yucca Mountain Repository.
@ColtCarbine Thanks for all that wonderfull insight.. Don't forget about all the nuclear powered ship's, nuke weapons and other toys between Everett, Bangor and Bremerton USN facilties...... not many places for us to run... And you are absolutley right about the grid lock getting out of any metro area. If you are not paying attention and getting out of the AO before the sheep start to stampede, you are screwed. Look what happened when they tried to evacuate the Galveston, TX area when Hurricane Rita was coming in. Roadways were overwhelmed and people were lined up for miles and miles, cars breaking down and running out of gas stuck in the back up. Hurricane Rita - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
No, there is not many places to run. The places you mentioned above are still more than 200 miles away from me. However, there are a couple of Universities in Oregon (Oregon State University and Reed College) that have small reactors for educational purposes. There are not many instances that the locale @Quigley_Sharps and @melbo reside in, is a worse location than where I live.
yep. with my luck, I'll be stuck within that 10 mile zone and the evac routes will be clogged with the idiots who cant drive on dry pavement much less any weather or disaster. i work 25 miles away, and have a parent that i would have to come home to get, and bug out.
And I will be scrambling out of this joint with a quickness!! Once the masses get wind of an issue, I will be stuck to logging roads heading East or South...
This is a reminder that we (as a nation) need to look at switching from the current nukular reactors to liquid flouride thorium reactors (LFTRs) Liquid fluoride thorium reactor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Chernobyl should have been reminder enough to switch to safer power reactors... And Fukishima. But alas, we persist in thinking it can't happen to us. After all, we are smarter than those others with better designs/procedures/locations. Hubris. One day, reality will slap us in the face. I have begun taking a closer look at hiking routes as well as vehicle/bicycle routes in case that day happens. But in reality, I will most likely be hanging around providing the county emergency management folks radio support with the local ARES group.
Being there is a predominant onshore flow in the NW, I do not see why you would need to leave unless the nuke threat was local and not from Hanford. Of course, this probably would only happen when there is a offshore flow.
We are fairly well set to BIn for a fallout scenario. We are surrounded by nuke stations but they do not worry me--it is two legged varmits that is the problem.